Murray Rothbard spoke of the 'half life' of concepts and the intellectuals who focus upon them. This could be related to Rothbard's law- Economists specialize in what they are least good at- by the fact that, like a nucleus bombarded with energetic particles, so too is a concept which is used with more precision than is warranted- this is the fault Aristotle called 'akribeia'- likely to degenerate rapidly. More generally, we find that the public intellectual who is all the rage today is regarded as a cretin three or four years down the line. The 'half life' of his shite turns out to be ephemeral.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta appeared smart some fifteen years ago. Even 8 years ago he was capable of trenchant criticism of the administration. Now he is a babbling fool who keeps resigning from some fledgling private college in rural Haryana and pretending that the fate of Liberal Democracy depends on the students he left in the lurch making life hell for those running their alma mater.
Three years ago, Mehta wrote an essay for Open Magazine about moral cretinism. It was widely admired by cretins like Yogendra Yadav and Dilip Simeon. Let us look carefully at Mehtaism and compare it to Modi-ism.
Who is the real cretin here?
IN AN ERA WHERE LANGUAGE HAS LOST ALL STABLE REFERENTS,
writing this sentence would be the act of a fool. Our era, by contrast, has stable referents- for Narendra Modi. That is why he isn't resigning and running away from anything. He isn't leaving anyone in the lurch. He isn't screaming 'Hindutva is in danger' in the way that Mehta is screaming 'Liberalism is in danger'. This is because Modi's language has stable referents. Mehta's does not.
it is difficult to find a word that describes the tenor of our times.
but easy to find a word to describe this cretin
But if, at the pain of gross simplification, one were to choose a word to characterise the times, ‘cretinism’ might not be a bad candidate.
Mehta has hit on the mot juste to define himself. The fact is cretinism is a developmental disorder which can be easily screened for and treated. Mehta & Co needn't have turned into cretins. Getting sacked the very first time they had started babbling nonsense would have had a salutary effect.
This is an age of both moral and political cretinism. The term ‘moral cretinism’ was perhaps first used by Alan Bullock in his biography of Hitler. It referred to a peculiar immunity that fascists had to any moral considerations or motivations.
This simply isn't true. Fascists were not different from Communists who weren't different from gangsters. But there was plenty of gangsterism involved in various Imperialist and Racist projects. Bullock, who had been Churchill's research assistant, ignored this because his own country was implicated in similar crimes on an on going basis. His famous maxim 'Hitler was jobbed into power by backstairs intrigue'- was simply false. The fact is, Hitler was brought into politics by the German Army. After the Communists decided that their real enemy was the Social Democrats, Hindenberg could rule by decree with the latter's consent. Ludendorff, however, was too crazy, to be his old boss's Chancellor. The fellow was almost as anti-Catholic as he was anti-Jewish. He had refused to go to jail over the Munich putsch and so Hitler eclipsed him. The problem with the General Staff was that it was divided. Blomberg hated Schleicher. So when Hitler killed Schleicher, whose deputy was running around shooting his mouth off, Blomberg got the Army to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Thus Hitler could take over from Hindenberg when he finally dropped dead. Hitler got rid of Blomberg and pursued the General Staff's maximal program better than any of them could have done themselves. But both World Wars had the same cause- France's lack of a credible offensive doctrine which would 'frontload' pain on the Germans. Weimar was a con based on recycling loans. It was inevitable that the General Staff would make its move once there was no net inflow of funds. What was unexpected was that Hitler would prove abler than the Generals. His genius was to lead them to a more comprehensive defeat than anybody had envisaged. Germany got the message. Their army now drills not with guns but broom-stick handles painted black. Thus Germany is rich and secure. France, thanks to De Gaulle, has a nuclear deterrent- i.e. a punitive offensive doctrine. That's it. That's the whole story. Cretinism does not matter. It is just an iodine deficiency.
Bullock was not entirely clear whether this was simply a deep incapacity, a pathological trait, or a willed condition.
He was merely saying 'boo to Fascists'.
But what the term captured quite startlingly was the idea that
Bullock had shit for brains. But he wrote well and back then the real enemy was the Soviets.
one could imagine a politics which was increasingly immune to any of the normal moral sensibilities.
Politics is the art of the possible. Moral sensibilities may be strategic or they may not. But they are defeasible. Nothing a priori can be said about whether they are normal or not.
It referred to a condition where our ordinary sense of compassion and decencies get immobilised.
No. Their range gets restricted. That is all.
They get immobilised to the point where a total inversion of values becomes possible: those who lynch get more political support than those who are lynched;
This is foolish. Mussolini was lynched. This did not represent a 'total inversion of values'. When he appeared to be making Italy rich and secure, he was valued. When the reverse was revealed to be the case the value of his life was less than a fart. Italian values hadn't changed. Circumstances had.
those who indulge in extraordinary brutal sexual violence are protected;
only in the imagination of a cretin.
the ‘other’ is demonised to the point where their basic humanity disappears from plain sight.
Mehta has demonized Modi. But it is Mehta who has gone mad and who has let down his students. Modi is not concerned with Mehta. He continues to discharge his much greater responsibilities.
The ordinary moral terms that should be positively valued—pity, compassion, sympathy, civility—become terms of contempt, supplanted by new virtues like pitilessness, indifference, antipathy and incivility.
Mehta is supposed to be a 'political scientist'. But he has turned into a paranoid nutter raving about 'brutal sexual violence'. Why does he not just start up an Indian version of Q Anon?
In some ways, all societies have elements of moral cretinism built in.
Yes! All societies have Post Offices which is where the brutal sexual violence occurs!
At various points, even the most morally progressive individuals can act like cretins: incapable or unwilling to be moved in the face of manifest moral demands.
A teacher shouldn't quit mid term. He should wait till the end of term. Mehta is unwilling to be moved in the face of the manifestly moral demand his students made that he stay his resignation- not ruin their life-chances and shit upon their alma mater with the result that their sheepskins will be badges of shame.
Radical inequality, where our fellow citizens almost seem like some other species, whose existence places no moral demands on us, can also produce a quotidian kind of cretinism.
There is radical inequality between a highly credentialized, celebrity Professor and the academically second rate students of a private college. Mehta was paid to teach such students so that overall epistemic inequality might fall a little. He let down those students. This was moral cretinism right enough.
Collective identities can sometimes abstract our thoughts away from the humanity and individuality of others, and make us particularly prone to cretinism.
Mehta thinks he is fighting some abstract or occult type of Hitlerism. This has made him prone to fuck over his students.
We are immune to the moral values at stake beyond the fulfilment of our own collective narcissism.
Mehta, Subramanian, Rajan & c, certainly suffer from 'collective narcissism'. They don't get why India might not want to subsidize their shitting on India the way that the American anti-India lobby is willing to do.
Our morality is defined by the need to seek new enemies.
Mehta's enemy is Modi. But Modi isn't Mehta's enemy. The fellow's narcissistic folly helps the ruling party.
Nationalism can sometimes lead to a profound moral regression in just this sense.
Either Nationalism is successful in creating or sustaining a Nation under the Rule of Law- in which case there is collective progress along moral dimensions- or it involves increasingly vicious internecine violence. Nations can fight each other over resources or religions or other such things without any 'moral regression'.
Caste identities can sometimes combine both of these features, making the privileged immune to any moral considerations.
In India, Caste identities stretch over poor people as well as a few 'privileged' people. The problem is unjust enrichment or entitlement. Mehta is an example of how unjust entitlement- viz. the notion that this cretin is smart- has caused moral delinquency (Mehta has let down his students and has shat upon the project of creating private Colleges of the American type) of a blatant sort.
But what is distinctive about our times is that cretinism itself becomes a high moral standard.
in the opinion of a cretin.
It is hard to imagine a time in recent history where political leaders
like Mamta. How about the Shiv Sena? Has no one told this cretin about the role of the Congress during the Emergency or the anti-Sikh riots? Why is his imagination so defective?
openly support a culture of violence without compunction or any trace of self-consciousness, public discourse routinely carpet-bombs fine distinctions with a view to making any nuanced moral responses impossible, and sympathy is routinely so partitioned along partisan lines that the possibility of any human response to tragedy and atrocity seems like a distant gleam.
The proper human response to 'tragedy and atrocity' is to raise resources to establish the Rule of Law. Mehta, cretin that he is, thinks it is about 'nuanced' responses of an entirely virtue signaling and vacuously rhetorical type.
There is an instrumentalism to every argument, such a relentless unmasking of motives that the very possibility of having a moral motive seems like an oxymoron, and the language of outrage is now so tired and wearied by being made to repeat itself that there is no language left to register the next
So quit talking vacuous shite you worthless blathershite!
The danger is not the existence of cretinism; it is its routinisation and elevation: a stunting of our moral imagination and the supplanting of it with an aggressive coarseness.
Political Scientists are supposed to do 'mechanism design' not virtue signal merely.
Moral cretinism finds its match in a kind of political cretinism: a corresponding inability to imagine the means to bring about political progress. The term ‘parliamentary cretinism’ was coined by Marx to describe a condition in which political representatives acted under the illusion that they, as representatives of the people, were actually the drivers of politics.
But Marx had shit for brains. Marxism has killed more people than Imperialism and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
These representatives could bring about a just society through political means. Political cretinism is a generalised version of the same illusion: a stunted political imagination that is consistently out of touch with reality.
Mehta has defined his own class. They are consistently out of touch with reality. Also they fuck up their students.
The ceremonies of politics go on, while its capacity to manage conflict and generate hope diminishes.
The ceremonies of academia go on, while its capacity to do anything worthwhile diminishes.
By contrast, Modi and Co. use ceremonies to generate resources and mobilize support for worthwhile programs beneficial to the Nation.
It refers to a politics that is prone to illusion at multiple levels.
Politics may be prone to illusions but Mehta's brand of Political Science is wholly delusive. It can provide no guidance in this matter.
Our priorities are out of whack—the fundamental challenges society faces often go unaddressed, as energies get dissipated in manufactured conflicts.
Indian Political Science should be empirical and focused on mechanism design. It should tell us how to deliver education and skills training more cheaply and effectively. It should not dissipate its energy in manufacturing a conflict with some long dead ideology associated with Hitler or other such abject failures.
Those in power are so besotted by their hubris that they become immune to knowledge;
This was certainly true of two Professors who had a lot of power over students at Ashoka University.
those not in power are too concerned with survival to even contemplate principles.
This stupid man does not get that 'principles'- i.e. normative triggers for action- encode survival strategies under conditions of existential scarcity and Knightian uncertainty.
Even with the BJP’s bravado, it is difficult to describe the subtle diminution in expectations that now plagues our politics.
This is not a well-formed sentence in the English language. Bravado has nothing to do with 'ekphrasis' though we could describe such rhetoric as having the quality of 'bravura'.
The problem with Mehta is that his Western education didn't make him Western enough. Still, in America he could represent India. But in India, he can't represent the West. His English isn't good enough. His knowledge of Western history and philosophy and culture is shallow.
Historical memory is short.
No. Human memory is short- it covers about 3 generations, i.e. a 'saeculum'. Historical memory is long.
Had Mehta been to the type of Grammar School which tries to get a few of its students into Oxbridge, he'd have had a tutor who went through his essays line by line making remarks of this sort. That's one reason a lot of English kids decided going to Uni was a waste of time. Why not just get a job in the City and earn ten times more than any Professor?
But there was a time, in the mid-2000s, when India finally looked like it was turning a corner:
because an Italian lady was in charge. Mehta would be even happier if it were a WASP man.
a consistent 8 per cent annual growth rate, the moderation of social conflict, imperfect institutions but ones capable of self-renewal, a pride in India’s pluralism, and a basic political civility all seemed within grasp.
What 'basic political civility' is this nutter talking about? Nandigram? That's what he liked? How about the attack on the Taj Hotel? Did that give him wood?
India’s power could be the power of its example.
No it couldn't. No power of any sort derives from example. Why? Tardean mimetics immediately competes away that edge unless it is 'absolute'. But, in that case, power does not derive from 'example'. It derives from a specific 'absolute advantage'.
That hope came crashing down, felled by a fatal combination of plutocracy and paralysis in India’s ruling classes.
Things come crashing down because they were piled up improperly and so they succumbed to gravity. It is not the case that plutocracy was piled upon paralysis or vice versa. There is no 'Structural Causal Model' here. This is unscientific balderdash. Mehta is writing like a bombastic 14 year old because he does not think before he writes. This is because he did not go to a proper school in the West. He did well at College because allowances were made for the darkie from a backward country. The result is that he is incapable of logical thought.
But despite four years of the Modi Government and great faith in the Prime Minister, that hope has not really recovered.
What hope? The hope of this cretin? But who cares about him? He hasn't made money. He is a parasite.
India’s economic performance is middling at best, more comparable to what would have been 5 per cent growth under the old way of measuring it, social conflict across every cleavage seems to be intensifying, most institutions from the judiciary to the media are now gasping for survival, pluralism has been replaced by majoritarian domination, and political civility by an itch to fight.
Mehta is reflecting merely upon his own position. At one time, he was part of the establishment. But that establishment alienated Hindus by inventing a 'Hindu terrorist' bogeyman. It sought to malign and prosecute people like Modi and Maya Kodnani on the basis of concocted evidence. Still, people were willing to tolerate this shit-show in the hope that when Rahul took over, things would improve. But Rahul never stepped up to the plate. The BJP became the default National Party and Modi the only credible candidate for the top job. This is even more true today. Mehta's career peaked when Hindus were out of power. But Hindus are 80 per cent of the population! It was inevitable that the majority would throw off a corrupt anti-majoritarian clique. Mehta should have returned to America rather than slum it at Ashoka and the columns of the Indian Express. Say what you like, cunts like Mehta take more care of their English when they think they will be read by native English speakers. It is only when they are in India, talking to (by their definition) less educated Indians, that their brains turn completely to shit.
The dominant register of politics has moved from hope to fear.
Mehta is shitting himself. His career peaked when he was in his forties. It has been down hill ever since. He must get back to America before his brain leaks out of his anus completely.
But the ultimate cretinism of the times is the kind of democracy we have become: we yearn for simplistic solutions that can promise deliverance from the complexities of democracy.
Mehta has a simplistic solution- Hindus should stop being the majority. At the very least, they must promise to vote for jihadi types.
We accept with docility the assault on our liberties and the decimation of institutions.
No. We accept with docility Mehta's assaults on our intelligence. But that is because we are laughing at him.
We are willing to risk heightened social conflict under the illusion that it will come in such controlled doses—targeted largely against vulnerable minorities—that it will not singe us all.
Targeted violence does not singe those at whom it isn't targeted. Mehta thinks 'vulnerable minorities' have some occult countervailing power. This simply isn't true. Once Hindus were killed, converted, or chased away from Pakistan or Bangladesh, what revenge could they take? None at all.
We are willing to live with a politics of illusion peddled with firm conviction rather than bear the burdens of truth.
Ashoka's student's were willing to live with Mehta's political science of illusion because they thought they might profit personally in some way. Then the fucker let the down. Provided he can get back to Amrika, more of his brain need not leak out of his anus.
CRETINISM IS A STANCE that the nation can become powerful only by becoming morally small.
No. Cretinism consists in saying stupid shit like the above. A nation can become powerful only by gaining economic and military power. Starving nations may be morally great. But they are pathetic, not powerful. India knows this very well.
It has a moral psychology behind it.
No. Cretinism is a developmental disorder. It features impoverished cognition in moral, psychological, political, economic and scientific fields. There is nothing behind it except the lack of something necessary for proper development- e.g. iodine.
Mehta's cretinism arises from the fact that when he was 15 or 16, he did not have a tutor who said 'you can't write shite like this if you want to get into Oxford. Even if you are black, you are English black, not Indian black. You are expected to write logical sentences because you studied in an English school.'
In those days, 'intellectual affirmative action' only stretched to black people who were from black ruled countries and thus who had some excuse for writing shite.
This is not to say that Indian or African schools were shite. Actually, they were often as good or better than English schools. But teachers there said 'We are a poor country. If you go abroad for higher education, be sure to learn as much Math as possible. If you can, do STEM subjects. Don't bother with 'liberal arts' gobshittery. Our native moral and spiritual tradition is better than that of the Westerner. What they are better at is technical, mathsy, stuff. Study that by all means. For fuck's sake don't turn into a gobshite and come boomeranging back to claim an unearned place in our power elite.'
The moral psychology is a critique of hypocrisy. It draws its sustenance from exposing the hypocrisy of anyone or any political force that would claim the moral high ground. Moral cretinism has a plausible starting point: that the existing custodians of power in any society are often full of hypocrisy and mendacity.
Unless they belong to the majority and are clearly doing that which is to the advantage of the majority. The charge of 'munafiqat' (hypocrisy) fails if actions are explicitly linked to 'munafa' (profit). We don't say- 'Modi is a hypocrite. He only pretends to like Hinduism and to want Hindus to do well.' We say, 'Modi is advancing a Hindutva agenda. If that is what Hindus want, then Modi profits by getting reelected.'
By contrast, Muslims do say 'Congress and the Left are hypocrites. They claim to help and protect us but don't actually do any such thing.'
Look at Ashoka University. How come it had so few Muslim professors? Couldn't Mehta, when V.C, have hired more Muslims? There are plenty of highly qualified candidates. Why were Muslims less then 3 per cent of the total faculty? The answer is, Mehta is a hypocrite. He doesn't care about Muslims- he only pretends to.
But it takes the exposure of hypocrisy in an unexpected direction. Rather than seeking to close the gap between what we are and what we claim to be, it takes the prevalence of hypocrisy to be a licence for a new kind of moral nihilism.
Nonsense! By saying, 'x is a hypocrite because x does not really care about y', we are not saying 'we care about y'. Replace y with 'human rights of terrorists' and this is obvious. We don't care about how often terrorists are tortured or how quickly they are killed. We object to others posing as holier-than-thou in this matter. Obama did not shut down Guantanamo and had Osama killed without a trial. Thus, anytime he tried to wag his tail, he was called on his hypocrisy. But that was cool because Obama didn't really try to shove his morality down anybody's throat. Still, his political eclipse was swift. He is a content provider for Netflix and his 'Organizing for America' was M.I.A within a year of his leaving office.
Biden, it seems, had more staying power.
On this view, the exposure of hypocrisy does not just become a tool for psychic warfare (to use Judith Shklar’s phrase) against opponents, it becomes a licence for anything goes.
Shklar was speaking only of instances where another's 'self-image' could be 'collapsed'. But Mehta's ego balloon can't be pricked. As for those he attacks, they don't read him because they don't respect him. He is a useless tosser not a guy coming up with superior 'mechanism design' for current programs.
How does 'exposure of hypocrisy' become a 'license for anything goes'? If I say 'you are a hypocrite. You say you are vegan but scoff bacon butties when no one is looking' is it really the case that I am likely to turn to cannibalism?
Cretinism exploits a moral asymmetry.
You need to be smart to 'exploit' 'asymmetries'.
Hypocrisy is, as the saying goes, the homage vice pays to virtue.
No it isn't. It is play-acting. It is deceptive behavior. The homage vice pays to virtue is money or respect so as to get virtue to do useful things from which vice benefits.
It still operates within the realm of moral distinctions; and it is a charge that shames us precisely because it points out that we are not morally living up to our own standards.
No. The charge of hypocrisy can arise in non-moral contexts. In a business deal, I may pretend that I am really very concerned with something I don't really care about so as to mislead the other side. Thus, I might say 'look, there's a deal here which could be made immediately. I want to sell the land right now and you have the cash. Obviously, I'm worried about the proper valuation of the mineral rights. The Surveyor's report will come in two months time. What I suggest is that we proceed with the deal on an escrow basis with such and such conditionality.' You may reply 'Stop this hypocrisy! You aren't interested in mineral rights. You just want us to commit while you shop around for a better offer!' What follows is a game of poker. My bluff re. mineral rights has been called but I may be able to create another red-herring re. 'air rights' or whatever. But all this has nothing to do with morality. It is a pure bargaining problem.
But the spreading of a belief that hypocrisy is everywhere has the effect of liberating us from answering to any morality at all.
Nonsense! When we say 'Stop play-acting!' we are not saying 'You have no self-interested motivations'. It is perfectly moral to do a deal based on rational self-interests. It is mere hypocrisy to pretend that everybody is 'answering the call of morality' when they negotiate an agreement. Still, as a matter of politeness, we may speak in a stilted way as though God or Morality or whatever was being served.
In such conditions, the immunity to moral argument itself begins to carry a new charm: ‘Whatever else I may be, I am not a hypocrite’ becomes an epitome of morality.
No. Morality is different from 'plain dealing'. Mehta is foolishly conflating two very different claims.
But this is a stance easier to take for those immune to moral considerations in the first place.
No. Negotiating stances are independent of morality. They refer to objective 'threat points' or correlated equilibria. Of course, experienced negotiators find negotiating easier than novices. But that is a matter of techne, not the arete distinguished by an episteme.
Unlike the typical Oxbridge student, Mehta didn't have these distinctions beaten into him at an early age. There's a reason you need to have some knowledge of Latin and Greek before you enter Uni to get a credential in the PP portion of PPE. Indians were welcome to go big on Mathsy stuff so as to make up for their deficiency in Classical Paideia.
Raghavan Iyer is an example of a guy who belatedly discovered this weakness in his education. But people like me learned from his mistake. We either gave Political Philosophy a miss or linked Classical philology to Game theory in the Aumann manner. Well, actually, we didn't bother. But, when drinking a little wine, this is how we conversed or, later on, thought about things before writing our poems or illiterate socioproctological blogposts.
The politics of cretinism exploits a certain moral asymmetry: So when liberals are accused of hypocrisy, the charge sticks because liberals are expected to operate in the realm of moral distinctions.
Nonsense! They are expected to actually be liberal- i.e. generous. But they can only be liberal if they are making a lot of money for themselves and paying a lot of that money as taxes. We don't give a fuck about their morality. A Conservative suffers when we discover his rent-boy is of the wrong color or religion. A Liberal- not so much- provided he makes a big donation to a Charity which rescues rent-boys of that type.
But when the BJP is accused of hypocrisy, the charge does not stick because
it says it cares about Hindus and does actually care about Hindus- which is useful in a country with an 80 per cent Hindu population
the easiest way to protect oneself from hypocrisy is to remove moral considerations altogether.
Mehta acknowledges no fucking 'moral considerations'. He could have held off on his resignation till his students had finished their courses and got good placements. But he has protected himself from a charge of hypocrisy by inventing a paranoid conspiracy which suits his inflated ego. He is pretending that Modi is quaking in his chappals before the might of Mehta's pen. Others of his ilk are eager to join him in this fantasy. Hopefully, they will all do very well in Biden's America where there is a well-funded anti-India lobby.
But a society where the entire focus of moral argument is on the motives and character of those making moral claims,
which is what Metha does
rather than on the rightness or substance of the claims
which is what Modi does- either building toilets is a good thing or it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter if the guy behind it is good or bad.
being made, is also a society that will at some point become deeply inured to any moral considerations. The relentless focus on hypocrisy creates a moral coarseness in its own right.
Mehta shows this moral coarseness by shitting on his students and their alma mater.
In its will to relentlessly take off our masks, it ends up scratching most of our faces as well. It does enough damage to delegitimise the liberal centre or even the Left; but in turn, it paves the way for the pure instrumentalism and power politics of the Right. Since we are all hypocrites, anything goes.
For Mehta & Co. Soon they will all be hugging each other in Biden's Amrika while enjoying cushy sinecures from the anti-India lobby.
I will deal with the remainder of Mehta's illiterate essay in my next post.
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